We Don't Know What We Thought

After years of getting "it is worse than we thought" from the Climate Catastrophists crowd and their pet scientists it turns out that maybe the certainty is not so certain after all. And wonder of wonders. Error is admitted.

Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings.

The study, published in 2009 in Nature Geoscience, one of the top journals in its field, confirmed the conclusions of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It used data over the last 22,000 years to predict that sea level would rise by between 7cm and 82cm by the end of the century.

At the time, Mark Siddall, from the Earth Sciences Department at the University of Bristol, said the study "strengthens the confidence with which one may interpret the IPCC results". The IPCC said that sea level would probably rise by 18cm-59cm [7" to 23" ed.] by 2100, though stressed this was based on incomplete information about ice sheet melting and that the true rise could be higher.

Many scientists criticised the IPCC approach as too conservative, and several papers since have suggested that sea level could rise more. Martin Vermeer of the Helsinki University of Technology, Finland and Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany published a study in December that projected a rise of 0.75m to 1.9m [30" to 75" ed.]by 2100.

I guess it is still worse than we thought. So what is the current rate of sea level rise you ask? Some say 2.2 mm a year is a pretty good number. Others like 3.3 mm a year. I have also seen lower numbers. The variation is due to the imprecision of measurement. No matter. Let me translate 2.2 mm a year is 22 cm (8 1/2") a century and 3.3 mm a year is 33cm (13") a century. The people cooking the books (excuse me Climate Scientists) are going to have to do a lot of work accelerating the real world to match their model predictions.



The graph is from World Climate Report which discusses it further.